‘Dark Forces’ Are Coming for Our Organic Food
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The Freedom Caucus is a rowdy band of GOP US House members most famous for triggering government shutdowns, pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and driving former GOP Speaker John Boehner from his post on the theory he wasn’t conservative enough. And now they’re coming for your certified organic food, according to Mother Jones magazine, from which the following is excerpted.
Back in December, the Freedom Caucus released a “recommended list of regulations to remove.” Among its 228 targets—ranging from eliminating energy efficiency standards for washing machines to kiboshing rules on private drones—the group named the National Organic Program.
Operated by the US Department of Agriculture, the NOP was established by the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 to set uniform national standards for foods and agricultural products labeled “USDA Organic,” replacing the patchwork of state-level standards that had held sway for decades previously. The NOP ensures that food labeled organic really is raised without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers—it also oversees USDA-accredited organic certifying agents and takes “appropriate enforcement actions if there are violations of the organic standards,” according to the USDA.
As of 2015, annual organic food sales stood at $39.7 billion, representing nearly 5 percent of total food sales. And sales for organics are growing at an 11 percent annual clip—nearly four times the rate of overall US food sales.
It’s not clear what the Freedom Caucus meant by putting the National Organic Program on a list of regulations to “remove.” The staff of US Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), the Freedom Caucus stalwart who authored the list, has not returned calls and emails asking for clarification. Organic food makes a strange target for deregulation, because organic regulations only apply to farms and food processors that voluntarily accept them. They prohibit, say, the spraying of synthetic pesticides only for a very certain kind of operation—ones that want to be certified organic.
Maybe it’s a budget-cutting move? The Freedom Caucus document claims the NOP’s “cost” stands at $256 million, without naming how it defines cost. But the NOP’s annual budget is just $9 million. And dismantling the NOP would generate massive chaos in the food market. A federally enforced, uniform, and fairly stringent set of rules would give way to a hodgepodge, leaving consumers flummoxed about what “organic” means.
The NOP’s appearance in the Freedom Caucus’ crosshairs has caused alarm in organic circles, and it’s not hard to see why. The Freedom Caucus’ zeal for deregulation is nothing new, but until a few weeks ago, the veto pen of Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate meant that the group could obstruct legislation and make plenty of trouble, but not actively legislate. Now there’s a new sheriff in town—a fast-food-eating Republican—and the GOP runs both houses of Congress. Suddenly, the Freedom Caucus has jumped from Fantasy Island to a perch quite near the center of Washington power.
Kathleen Merrigan, who served a long stint as deputy USDA secretary under Obama, has sounded the alarm. Merrigan is a canny DC operator who chooses her words carefully, and she knows the politics around organics as well as anyone.
The NOP’s appearance in the Freedom Caucus’ crosshairs has caused alarm in organic circles, and it’s not hard to see why. The Freedom Caucus’ zeal for deregulation is nothing new, but until a few weeks ago, the veto pen of Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate meant that the group could obstruct legislation and make plenty of trouble, but not actively legislate. Now there’s a new sheriff in town—a fast-food-eating Republican—and the GOP runs both houses of Congress. Suddenly, the Freedom Caucus has jumped from Fantasy Island to a perch quite near the center of Washington power.
Kathleen Merrigan, who served a long stint as deputy USDA secretary under Obama, has sounded the alarm. Merrigan is a canny DC operator who chooses her words carefully, and she knows the politics around organics as well as anyone. In addition to her recent USDA experience, she served as the head of the USDA agency that oversaw the NOP under Bill Clinton, and she helped craft the federal act that created it while working as a Senate staffer in 1990. According to a Politico account of her remarks at a food conference last week, Merrigan warned that “forces of darkness” are “coming together and saying, ‘Let’s sharpen our knives on organic.'”
Merrigan declined to be interviewed for more detail on what she meant by her “forces of darkness” remarks. She did confirm that she had the Freedom Caucus document in mind, as well as a January 12 op-ed by the father-and-son lobbyists Marshall Matz and Peter Matz, of the powerhouse DC agribusiness lobbying firm Olsson, Frank & Weeda. In recent years, Marshall Matz’s clients have included Nestlé, agrichemical-seed giant Syngenta, and FMC, which makes carrageenan, a seaweed-derived food thickener that has emerged as a controversial additive in processed organic products like almond milk.
In their op-ed, the Matzes applauded the Freedom Caucus’ naming of the NOP. But rather than call for the USDA’s oversight of organics to be nixed, they call for it to be “reformed.” They acknowledge that organic food now represents a “significant market.” And rather than focus on the NOP, the Matzes instead raised questions about another key USDA organic component, the National Organic Standards Board, a 15-member panel that, among other things, has a huge influence over what nonorganic substances can be added to organic food.
The National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances, as it has been known, has long been contentious terrain, pitting Big Food companies with organic subsidiaries against watchdog groups like the Cornucopia Institute. Broadly speaking, the corporations want wide leeway on additives, while the watchdog groups demand strict limits. In their op-ed, the Matzes declared that the “NOSB should leave the issue of food ingredient safety to the FDA.”
Do the Matzes mean that food companies should be able to put any additive they want into, say, organic cookies, as long as the Food and Drug Administration deems it safe? They declined to say.
So what Merrigan called the “forces of darkness” coming for organic food are indeed pretty obscure about exactly what they want. Does the Freedom Caucus really want to nix the National Organic Program to save $9 million per year? The $39.7 billion organic-food industry, whose participants include giant companies like General Mills and Nestlé-owned Gerber organic baby products—would likely push back pretty hard. But with lobbyists like the Matzes operating in Trump’s Washington—and looking reasonable compared with Freedom Caucus deregulatory zealots—the time might be ripe for making organic standards more friendly to corporations.
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ORGANIC FARMLAND TOPS 4 MILLION ACRES IN AMERICA
A new report has found that organic farmland reached 4.1 million acres in 2016, a new record and an 11 percent increase compared to 2014. And as of June, 2016, the number of certified organic farms in the U.S. reached 14,979, a 6.2 percent increase of 1,000 farms compared to 2014 survey data.
The report, from market data service Mercaris, found that the top five states in organic cropland are California, Montana, Wisconsin, New York, and North Dakota. California leads the U.S. with 688,000 acres. However, Montana has seen a 30 percent increase in organic farmland, reaching 417,000 acres in 2016, an increase of 100,000 acres since 2014 on 50 new organic farms.
North Dakota, Colorado, and New York all increased their organic acres by more than 40,000 since 2014. North Dakota has surpassed Oregon as the fifth leading state in organic acreage. Oregon is sixth followed by Colorado and Texas.
Scott Shander, an economist at Mercaris, attributes the increase in organic acres to farm economics and consumer demand for organic foods.
According to Alex Heilman, a sales associate at Mercaris, the number of organic acres is likely to continue increasing, especially with larger companies such as General Mills and Ardent Mills launching programs to increase organic acres.
Organic alfalfa/hay was the leading organic crop grown with more than 800,000 acres in 2016. This was followed by organic wheat, corn, and soybeans with 482,000, 292,000, and 150,000 acres respectively. Organic oats reached a record level of 109,000 acres in 2016. Organic wheat showed the greatest increase with nearly 150,000 more acres since 2014 and a 44 percent increase since 2011. Plantings of organic corn increased by 58,000 acres since 2014.
The percentage of acres planted to organic crops such as wheat, corn, soybeans, and oats remains small compared to conventional crops in the U.S. Organic corn accounts for only 0.31 percent of total corn acres; organic wheat was 0.9 percent of total wheat acres; organic soybeans were 0.2 percent of total soybean acres. Organic oats account for the highest percentage of an organic crop with 3.6 percent of total oat acres.
Acreage of both organic corn and soybeans has seen small increases as a percentage of total acres for both crops in the past few years, according to the report. This may be due to the fact that the U.S. is importing large amounts of organic corn and soybeans, which is depressing the U.S. market and prices for both crops. According to Shander, 25 percent of organic corn and 75 percent of organic soybeans used in the U.S. are imported.
“It’s a global market that is dictating U.S. prices,” he says. “Demand for organic corn and soybeans is still growing strongly, but production in the U.S. is not growing as fast so more of the production will be international.”
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ORGANIC CONSUMERS ASSOCIATION PLANS ANTI-TRUMP STRATEGY
Ronnie Cummins, International Director of the Organic Consumers Association, wants us all to get involved in his plans to resist the Trump administration. So
I’m giving him the remainder of this blog post to reach out to me and you. Here’s Ronnie:
I’ve been an activist for most of my life, starting out in the Deep South where it was not only difficult, but at times dangerous to protest war, corporate crime, and political corruption. But now after 50 years of activism, I have never seen more potential for a grassroots-powered organic and political revolution than I see right now.
That’s why I’m reaching out to you now, to ask for your help in regenerating our food and farming system, our public health and our political system.
Recently more than 5,000 people tuned in for OCA’s first national call-in to discuss how to #resist and #regenerate—in the marketplace and in the political arena—over the next four years. I believe it’s absolutely critical that we join forces to resist the Trump Administration, the business-as-usual Congress, and the corporate establishment’s attacks on our health, our environment and our democracy.
But resistance alone isn’t enough. We need to bring solutions to the table. We need to bring a message of hope—the message of Regeneration—to our fellow activists, and to our city, county and state lawmakers.
On the recent call-in, I outlined several ways we can work together to build a more powerful movement, beginning by organizing hundreds of meetups and house parties in our local communities across the country. To what end? To encourage those who are doing great work to step out of their silos, to meet each other, to share common goals, to share resources, to come up with a plan to work more effectively together. Because our best hope to create the world we want, is to harness our collective consumer and political power.
If you’d like to host or attend a Regeneration Meetup or house party in your community, please sign up for more information at www.organicconsumers.org.
We also talked about how to get more involved in city, county and state elections by joining forces with local, regional and state Our Revolution chapters. Our Revolution’s political platform, essentially the Bernie Sanders platform, is closely aligned with our own #politicalrevolution platform. If we get involved with Our Revolution’s work, we can bring the message of regeneration to the political revolution, and ensure that the next wave of city, county and state elected officials support a platform based on regeneration.
In the coming weeks and months, OCA will roll out a few key #ConsumerRevolution campaigns. I hope you’ll support these, and encourage the people you meet in local meetups, or in local Our Revolution chapters, to do the same. Details will be on our website.
When we founded the OCA 18 years ago, we never dreamed that our network would grow to over two million people in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands in Mexico. We couldn’t have predicted that together with our allies in the food and farming, natural health, climate and political movements we would be able to harness the energy, creativity and political power of tens of millions of people.
But here we are. And despite the daily doses of dismal news coming out of Washington D.C., we now face an unprecedented opportunity to create new paradigms—of regenerative food and farming, natural health, consumer activism, and grassroots-powered citizen democracy.
I hope you’ll be inspired to participate, in one form or another. Please take this opportunity to host or attend a local meetup, to join a local, regional or state Our Revolution chapter, or to make a donation to support this important work. Thank you!
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